Quick hit: Google Science Fair winners “all about girl power”

Our judges said the unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems. They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public—like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home—as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research.

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Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they're wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won't agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future.
Terri writes/tweets under the name terriko, enjoys making things and mentoring others and has a plain ol' home page at http://terri.toybox.ca.

OK I’ve read it a couple of times and I can’t stop being bothered by the sentence: “Note that the science fair wasn’t a women-in-science event; these young women beat a lot of other talented youngsters to take home those trophies!”

Is there a way to phrase that so everyone feels good and people who win at women-in-science things can still feel like it’s also a solid victory? I’m pretty sure that’s the intent for this note but it’s coming across a bit off, like winning at a women-in-science event would be a lesser win.

Sometimes people assume, upon seeing winners who are all women, that the event must have been gender-limited, and that was not the case for this science fair although Google is fairly well-known for sponsoring women-centric events. I just wanted to make that clear for people who might not click through the link to read more about the competition.

I don’t think clarifying that the competition was open to all is somehow denigrating other wins. It’s not like I said “and they totally beat boys so they’re extra awesome!” I just said they beat a lot of other talented competitors. But if anyone can suggest another phrasing that works better, please do.

Well that makes a lot of sense, and so perhaps that would be a great way to phrase it – “Note: Even though it may appear so at first since all three of these talented youngsters are all female, this was not a women-in-science event.”

I want to hug this post and save it for my (three-month old) daughter to counterbalance all the pink fairy princess stuff, and movies with only male characters, she’s going to be exposed to. And on the other hand, I hope I will have heaps more examples like it by the time she can understand it.

My name is Rebecca and I am an intern at Teen Voices, a magazine that seeks to support and educate teen girls to amplify their voices and create social change through media. It is so wonderful that these young women have been so successful in science. Too often these days young woman do not reach their full potential in the sciences because it is considered a man’s subject. Kudos to these young ladies!